A hectic life of newyorker has its benefits and most definitely drawbacks. Our coffee-infused culture at times makes it completely unbearable to be productive at work and social with friends, balancing the rest at the same time. When days start going by too fast and I take weekends to sleep until noon, I know it’s time to leave big city and go back to nature…
Update: I have shut down FindRoomRent.COM, and domain is available through Godaddy. The project did not spin off due to numerous factors. This article is kept here to illustrate the idea and implementation.
Dealing with people is always hard – different characters, likes, lifestyles and a ton of other variables. It gets more interesting when you are trying to find a roommate. There are of course no ideal ones. But while you search you get to meet a lot of interesting individuals. And hopefully you won’t get scammed, or even robbed as some shady people like to “preview” places before they break in…
As I have started using Twilio in my applications extensively, for one of the clients there was a need to send out texts from the MS Access database application. After looking around, I have read about MS Outlook text messaging service, but most of the providers were quite shady, so I had decided to write code myself. Which I am sharing now with you.
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While working on a first big project of mine written in Grails I needed functionality of sending a text message to the user in order to verify their identity. The choice was either go with Google Voice API, use email-to-text-message service of a particular wireless provider or look for something else.
Google Voice’s API is great, but because Google Voice itself is free you can’t really rely on it for web applications. After reaching a limit of 250 texts a day it will stop letting you send more. An alternative to it would be email to text solution – something like your-number@vtext.com for instance for sending texts to Verizon Wireless customers. However, you want to make your customer think less and therefore an extra question as to what is your wireless provider is not a great option.
After some research, I’ve found numerous sites offering API for sending texts and later on decided to go with Twilio for my needs. A piece below describes the process of creating Grails service for sending text messages via Twilio. continue reading »
A question of Twitter monetization has been around for a while, but nobody seems to have an idea of how this can be achieved. Well, it seems that I might have the answer. Twitter bots, well “intelectual ones” like the one, I’ve exampled earlier.